Downtown loses spaces to ease parking congestion

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“Oh no, now you’re going to make me work,” said the owner of Sassy Bagz, 908 9th Ave.

Ben Hernandez rolls the dolly inside the door and quips:

“You made me work just trying to find parking,” he said with a laugh.

A lack of parking has been the joke in downtown Greeley for years, one city and downtown officials have long tired of as they’ve worked to improve the business atmosphere for the last four decades.

But this week and last, they did what naysayers would say was the unthinkable.

They took away spaces — *16 of them.

The days of cars packed three layers deep in angle parking along 9th Avenue between 10th and 7th streets are coming to an end. Fueled by a surge in parking tickets, and ticket appeals in municipal court, the city opted to take advantage of an already scheduled overlay project along 9th Avenue to pull the angled parking from the center of the street, which pinched space so tight safety was becoming a concern. The city formed a mini parking committee to come up with the changes, which the city implemented over the last two weekends.

“We received a number of chronic complaints from residents about how difficult it was to park safely,” said Becky Safarik, Greeley’s assistant city manager.

The city took out the center-aisle angle parking and repainted the lines to offer some parallel spaces, which are accessible from either side of the street.

Between 7th and 9th streets, the city also repurposed the center aisle parking to accommodate longer vehicles that would normally get a $50 ticket for parking over the lines.

“We did lose those spaces, but they’re more flexible, so more people could park in more locations, like the bigger trucks that had a hard time parking in any of the spots,” Safarik said.

Safarik and downtown business owners said the parking would have been plenty in front of the storefronts were it not for downtown employees parking in those spaces. The county in recent years allowed employees to park at a county lot at 9th Avenue and 10th Street, but they weren’t using it in great numbers.

“There’s not a lot of customers that park there,” said Woody’s Newsstand Manager Kimberly Bode, of the spaces in front her corner shop at 9th Avenue and 10th Street. “People other than customers have been parking there. I watch it every day.”

For years, county employees working at the courthouse, or at the Centennial Center, or even the probation offices, have used the parking along 9th and 9th, coming out dutifully every two hours to move their vehicles to avoid tickets.

Safarik said the changes also have come with an added emphasis for county employees to use the provided county parking lot during working hours.

“They indicate they would reinforce that lot, which is almost never full,” Safarik said.

In its first week, the new parking configuration got some mixed reviews.

Jim and Suzanne Sereff at Warm Hugs Mixes and Gifts at the corner of 9th and 9th, said they loved the changes. For the past few years, customers have come into their store complaining of the parking tickets they’d get for their vehicles being parked over lines they couldn’t see.

“People probably thought twice about coming down here,” Suzanne Sereff said of customers who were ticketed. “Downtown has always been a tight block.”

The Sereffs now enjoy the openness that has come with he change and say customers have not yet complained.

Safarik said she’s heard compliments and witnessed first-hand how the new spaces were being received.

“It was gratifying to see people had figured out the parallel parking,” Safarik said. “There’s a lot more openness to the corridor, and the feedback we’ve gotten so far is people have noticed the difference and they’ve been appreciative.

“Hopefully, it addressed those bottlenecks. We’re interested in evaluating this and getting feedback from residents as the summer wears on.”

Looking out from her cash register, Jandreau at Sassy Bagz worries how the reduced parking will affect her business. She falls a bit in the old camp, the one that subscribes to the “more spaces equals more customers” approach.

She agreed the ticketing has been a problem for customers, however.

“People don’t have enough time in two hours to eat and go shopping,” she said. “And trucks and SUVs, even a suburban” couldn’t fit into the tightly drawn-up parking spaces.

Safarik said the parking committee soon will revisit the hourly parking time limits.

“We’ll look at hourly parking and see if there’s not more adjusting we can do,” Safarik said. “We have one, two and three hour parking, which creates some confusion for some customers. We’ll watch the patterns of how people park, and where we seem to have problems” and re-evaluate.

The moves do anticipate the future of parking downtown, Safarik said. It’s no secret the city and the Downtown Development Authority want to build a downtown convention center and hotel, complete with a parking garage. The city is looking for developers now.

“We fully expect structured parking will be part of the next wave to addressing parking downtown,” Safarik said. “We have a long ways to go, and we’re certainly contemplating and anticipating that.”

Jandreau doesn’t want to be a downer; she loves having her shop downtown. But she worries nonetheless.

Hernandez, her FedEx delivery driver, said the parking is still hard to come buy, but it also is easier to maneuver in a big delivery truck.

“Before, it was the worst,” Hernandez said.

Bode, a few doors down, continued serving up coffee in the late afternoon sun last week to a crowded lobby at Woody’s Newsstand.

“We love it,” she said. “It looks nice.”

*EDITOR’S NOTE: This story his been clarified to update the number of parking spaces that would be lost with changes to the parking structure downtown. City officials originally estimated the loss would be 40-50 spaces, but the final work had not yet been done. Once city crews completed the work and counted all of the spaces, the final tally came to a loss of 16 spaces.